Which is more likely to breed anti-Americanism and radical Islam—an American-run prison in Iraq, or an American-run prison in America? The depredations at Abu Ghraib notwithstanding, a report from the Department of Justice suggests that the answer may be the latter. Despite recent cautionary examples like Jose Padilla, who is believed to have been radicalized in prison before allegedly plotting to detonate a dirty bomb (the shoe bomber Richard Reid is thought to have been similarly radicalized in a British prison), the Justice Department reports that safeguards against religious extremism in federal prisons are still remarkably lax. No national Islamic organization is currently authorized by the Bureau of Prisons to approve new Muslim chaplains, which has led to an acute clerical shortage. There is currently only one chaplain for every 900 Muslim inmates, and no new Muslim chaplains have been hired since 2001. This gap is being filled by inmate-led prayer sessions—and inmates, according to interviews with prison officials and Muslim chaplains, are likely to radicalize their fellow prisoners, urging them to overthrow the U.S. government (because "Muslims aren't cowards," as one group of converts was taught) and preaching a breed of "Prison Islam" that distorts Koranic teaching to promote violence and gang loyalty. France has already seen the results of a similar trend, the report notes. In French prisons inmates exercise considerable control over Muslim worship, creating a "terrorist university" that spreads anti-Semitic and anti-Western tapes, books, and pamphlets throughout the penal system.

When the Center for Global Development ranked rich countries' commitment to fighting global poverty in 2003—taking into account trade, immigration, investment, peacekeeping, foreign-aid, and environmental-protection policies—the United States came in a miserable twentieth out of twenty-one nations. The 2003 index, however, drew complaints of unfairness and inaccuracy. According to a Washington Post columnist, it considered only "multilateral" peacekeeping, ignoring the missions America takes on alone; it measured gross rather than net immigration levels, giving an unfair boost to Switzerland and other countries that admit numerous foreign workers only to kick them out later; and it excluded private foreign-aid donations, which some U.S. tax incentives encourage. In this year's "Ranking the Rich" index, which corrects for these and other factors, the United States rises to a four-way tie for seventh place—still behind global good cops like Sweden and Canada, but even with France and Germany, and way ahead of Japan (which ranked dead last for the second year running). Judging from the rankings, America excels at helping the developing world indirectly, through trade policies that benefit developing nations and through its easygoing (or at least loosely enforced) immigration laws. When it comes to direct aid, the United States is far stingier, coming in nineteenth on the index, ahead of only Greece and New Zealand. And on environmental policies the United States ranks last.

Immigrants to the United States may not necessarily find a better life than the one they left behind, but they are likely to enjoy a longer one—longer even than native-born Americans, according to research published recently in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. Male and female immigrants to the United States live 3.4 and 2.5 years longer, respectively, than their U.S.-born counterparts, and that gap widens dramatically in the black and Hispanic populations. Whereas U.S.-born black men have a life expectancy of 64, their immigrant counterparts live to an average age of 73; and whereas U.S.-born Hispanic men live to 73, on average, their immigrant counterparts have a life expectancy of around 77. This gap—which prevails even though immigrants are poorer, less likely to have health insurance, and less likely to visit doctors than the general population—may reflect the tendency of immigrants to be among the healthier people in their country of origin; immigrants also have better dietary habits than the U.S. population as a whole, and they smoke and drink less. (According to the National Institutes of Health, black immigrants are one third as likely to be smokers as American-born blacks.) But these advantages seem to erode over time; as immigrants acculturate to the United States and, presumably, adopt the unhealthful habits associated with life in their new country, their chances of disability and chronic illness increase.

If the European Union were a U.S. state, it would rank forty-seventh in per capita GDP, according to a report from Timbro, a Swedish free-market think tank. (Yes, there really is one.) In annual income the average European is on a par with residents of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Arkansas. (And the report excludes the newer, poorer EU nations of Eastern Europe.) The picture isn't much rosier even in wealthier European states like France and Britain, both of which have per capita GDPs slightly lower than Alabama's. Only tiny Luxembourg scores better than the American average. The United States' material advantage extends beyond income: Americans spend 77 percent more annually than Europeans, own more appliances, and (presumably thanks to our wide open spaces) have homes providing, on average, 721 square feet per person—nearly twice the average size of European residences. The study's authors allow that fast-growing GDP is "not the be all and end all of happiness and prosperity," citing more "intangible" (and quintessentially European) factors such as equality, leisure time, and the environment. But they note, with a defensiveness undoubtedly endemic among Swedish free-marketeers, that "material resources" are a "precondition of much of the wellbeing which people like to call intangible."

Monogamy is the key to a thriving sex life, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study aimed at quantifying the links among income, sex, and general happiness. Married people have considerably more sex than swinging singles and gay divorcees, and the "happiness-maximizing" number of sexual partners in a given year is almost exactly one. Rising wealth has no positive effect on the frequency of sex, and increased education actually has a slightly negative effect, particularly among men. (This is unfortunate news for the well-educated, since they are the group for whom sexual activity has the highest impact on happiness.) Strikingly, men consistently report more sexual activity than women do. Unless a disproportionate number of men in the sample population are gay or visit prostitutes, it "is not easy to see how this gender difference can be genuine," the authors write; they gently suggest that this discrepancy may be attributable to "exaggerated memories" among the male population.

Over the first two thirds of the twentieth century black Americans abandoned the South in droves, producing a "great migration" northward in search of manufacturing jobs and more social equality. Now a Brookings Institution analysis suggests that a reverse "great migration" seems to be picking up speed, driven by an improved economic and racial climate in the South and the strong cultural and familial connections that many blacks still feel with the region. According to Brookings, migration accounted for a net gain of more than 600,000 black residents in the South from 1975 to 2000, while the rest of the country lost black residents. College-educated blacks are leading the way southward, and the biggest beneficiaries of the shifting migration patterns and attendant "brain gain" are booming "New South" cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis. But the trend extends across all the southern states except Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—and even in those states the outflow of blacks has slowed dramatically over the past decade. Meanwhile, cities in the Rust Belt and the Northeast, in particular, have been losing black residents for some time, and California's long reign as a "black migrant magnet" seems to have ended. From 1965 to 1970 and again from 1975 to 1980 California's net gain of black residents was greater than any other state's; in the last five years of the 1990s, however, its net loss of black residents was larger than that of any other state except New York.

Forget McDonald's—it's the leafy avenues and spreading parking lots of suburbia that are to blame for America's obesity epidemic. According to an exhaustive new study examining the link between population density and health in 448 American counties, the residents of the country's more sprawling counties tend to be heavier and have more weight-related chronic illnesses—particularly high blood pressure—than the residents of more densely populated counties. The study relied on a U.S Census—based "Sprawl Index" that assigned the lowest numerical scores to the most sprawling counties (352 points for crowded New York County; 63 points for suburban Geauga County, outside Cleveland), and found that for every fifty-point increase in the degree of sprawl, the odds of a county resident's being obese rose by 10 percent. Cities encourage walking and physical fitness, the authors argue, whereas suburban homes are so far from friends, stores, and workplaces that even the most health-conscious residents are forced off the sidewalk and behind the wheel.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.